50 years after Dora, are we as safe? Perhaps not

Two homes at Ponte Vedra Beach lay toppled in the surf on Sept. 10, 1964, after waves driven by Hurricane Dora washed away the foundations. These were among 12 homes along State Road AlA that were destroyed in the storm.

A man near St. Augustine called the Jacksonville weather service station early on Sept. 10, 1964. The battering wind had stopped, he said. Dozens of birds were out, eating hordes of insect. He could see the stars, clearly.

With that call, meteorologists then knew: The eye of Hurricane Dora was ashore.

That they had to depend on such reports was evidence, Roger G. Plaster later wrote, that hurricane forecasting tools were “certainly in the horse and buggy days” compared to what came later.

Yet Plaster — the meteorologist in charge in Jacksonville from 1946 to 1972 — was proud that his forecasters kept the populace safe from Dora.

“NO FATALITIES is a proper reward,” he wrote, 30 years later.

Yet with all the advances in technology, would we be as safe if another big storm hit?

Plaster’s conclusion wasn’t a happy one. “‘No’ is the answer,” he said.

There’s just so much new building, so many new people, so close to the beach, he fretted: How could you get them all to leave when they had to?

You couldn’t.

Plaster died in 1999, but his concerns live on in those who followed him — such as Scott Cordero, the current meteorologist in charge at the National Weather Service in Jacksonville.

“Since 1964 we have a lot more people near the coast, a lot more infrastructure in place, a lot more monetary value built into that infrastructure,” Cordero said. “Let’s say we have another Dora hit — it would be devastating.”

To be sure, forecasters and emergency management officials say Northeast Florida and Southeast Georgia are vastly more prepared for hurricanes than they were 50 years ago.

Meteorologists are much more likely to know where the storm will hit, how strong it will be, how long it will last, and what effects it might bring.

On a tour of the weather bureau office, Cordero showed off the forecasting equipment available today — a long way from the days when forecasters used grease pencils to track hurricanes across grainy radar screens.

“No one should be uninformed in this community,” said Skip Cramer, former CEO of the American Red Cross in Northeast Florida.

On top of that, building standards have been upgraded, particularly since the devastation of Hurricane Andrew in 1992.

“There’s a lot more engineering involved, a lot more hold-downs, tie-downs,” said Dean Davis, a homebuilder who works largely at the beaches. “A typical 3,000-foot-home, you’re probably spending an extra $3,000, $4,000 in tie-downs.”

Steve Woodard, director of emergency preparedness in Jacksonville, said evacuation plans are better too: New maps unveiled last week break down potential flooding spots across Northeast Florida to an almost street-by-street level.

Still, hurricanes are a very real threat, said Cordero.

“Would lives be saved due to all the modern technology and everything else? Absolutely,” he said. “Would it make us storm-proof? Absolutely not.”

It gets back to all the new people.

Duval County grew from 455,000 people in 1960 to an estimated 886,000 today. St. Johns went from 30,000 to 202,000; Nassau from 17,000 to 75,000; Clay from 20,000 to 194,000.

In Georgia, Camden County went from almost 10,000 people in 1960 to more than 51,000 today.

Each place is still growing.

That means more people to evacuate, more people to shelter, said Billy Estep, Nassau County’s director of emergency management. He worries about that: With limited roads heading west, evacuating coastal Amelia Island will be Nassau’s biggest challenge.

“What point in time do we start making the decision to evacuate?” Estep said. “Our window may be a little earlier than, say, Duval County.”

It occurs even after Superstorm Sandy in 2012. After Northeast Florida’s huge evacuation (and close call) from Hurricane Floyd in 1999. After Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

After all, it’s been 50 years since Dora, the last direct hit in the Jacksonville area. It’s been almost nine years since Florida was hit by a hurricane. Meanwhile, this season is forecast to be sleepy, and last year was mostly a snooze.

Then, there’s the widespread thought that the area is almost immune to such storms.

Not so, said Cordero, even though he said Northeast Florida’s latitude makes for upper-level winds that often nudge storms away.

But that’s hardly a guarantee. And when the next hurricane hits — and there will be a next one — the shallow ocean floor and flat topography means a strong storm surge is a very real danger, he said.

Florida has learned some things about evacuating from a storm, however. Especially after gigantic Hurricane Floyd in 1999, which took dead aim at Jacksonville and coastal Georgia — but whose eye ended up slipping by just 150 miles out to sea.

It kicked off what was at the time the largest evacuation in U.S. history, with 1.3 million people estimated to have hit the road in Florida alone.

That resulted in gridlock across coastal Georgia and Northeast Florida.

A typical scene: After nine or more hours on the road, hundreds of evacuees from the beaches made it as far as Lake City, where they pitched tents or slept in their cars in the parking lots of overflowing hotels.

Others never made it that far, breaking down or running out of gas or turning back in frustration.

Some of that frustration came in seeing the empty eastbound lanes of Interstate 10, the main evacuation route from the coast, when the westbound lanes were backed up mile upon mile.

After criticism, the state came up with a plan — which hasn’t had to be implemented yet — to open all lanes of I-10 for westbound evacuees.

Florida Department of Transportation spokeswoman Gina Busscher said that would start east of I-295 and go past I-75.

“It was a lesson learned from Floyd,” she said.

Other thinking has changed since Floyd, said Busscher, as officials worried that too many people were evacuating when they didn’t need to — adding up to more dangerous and more clogged roads.

“Sheltering in place is really the best answer for those people who are out of direct danger,” Busscher said.

Cordero, the meteorologist, said evacuations are precautionary, and of course it turns that some — such as Floyd’s — turn out to be false alarms.

That doesn’t mean that people who need to get out of town shouldn’t take those orders seriously, he said.

“Let’s say I told you today that you had a one in four chance of getting hit by a car,” Cordero said. “Would you take notice?”

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Mr. Plaster, a fine Southern gentleman, hired me in 1961 while in high school, as a summer meteorologist trainee. I worked three summers and made sufficient remuneration to pay for four years of college. One of my tasks was to plot thunderstorms with those colored grease pencils from co-ordinates off a teletype. Since there were no windows in the bureau office I was often sent upstairs to the air traffic control tower to see if it was raining.